The compatibility of organic materials and device concepts to high resolution, cost-effective patterning techniques exhibits a major requirement in order to warrant their commercial success. In particular, down-scaling and high density integration of organic field effect transistors (OTFTs) is essential to overcome current performance limitations and to make OTFTs become a prospective device for applications e.g. in active matrix displays or organic microprocessors.
With respect to the production of organic electronic devices having an electronically active region which is being made at least in part from an organic material and which is in contact with one or more electrodes. Various methods for structuring the organic semiconductor layers were proposed, e.g. shadow mask deposition, laser ablation, inkjet printing, or nano-imprinting. However, they are either lacking in their throughput capacitance, accessible feature size, or their compatibility with the organic compounds themselves. Photolithography on the other hand is a very powerful technique which is currently adopted as a standard patterning approach for inorganic electronic industry. However, except of some limited cases (cf. Balocco et al., Org. Electron. 7, 500 (2006), Huang et al., J. Mat. Chem. 17, 1043 (2007)), conventional photo-resist, developer, and solvent compounds (using e.g. tuluol and alkaline solvents) are not applicable to organic materials.